Many scientists willing to concede that birds and other animals can
experience negative emotions such as fear, cry “anthropomorphism” and
“sentimentality” if you dare to suggest that animals can experience happiness
and pleasure, as well. Marian Stamp Dawkins, a professor of animal behavior in
the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford, who has done a lot of
experimental research into “what hens want,” scoffs at the presumption that the
individuals of other species showing similar behavior to that of humans when
eating, being touched by their companions, playing together, or having sex,
enjoy the experience. She implies that people who believe that nonhuman animals
have an evolved capacity to enjoy life have abandoned the rigorous intellectual
standards that define the behaviorist science to which she subscribes. According
to these standards, “the existence of conscious feelings cannot be tested
empirically, and so the study of conscious emotions is outside the realm of
science.”

Let us stipulate that there are dimensions of reality beyond science, just as
there are scientific prospects that are beyond behaviorism. This said, there is
a correlation in human life between things that we must do to survive and
perpetuate ourselves and the pleasure we derive from doing these things. We have
to eat to live, and eating is a primary pleasure in human life. We have to have
sex in order to perpetuate our species, and sex is a primary pleasure in human
life. We have to play in order to relieve tension – and (to risk tautology)
enjoy ourselves. Why would it be more plausible, or plausible at all, to assume
or conclude that other animals, engaging in the identical acts of eating,
touching, playing together, and having sex that we do, have not been endowed by
nature with the same incentives of pleasure and enjoyment to do the things that
need to be done in order to survive and thrive?

If we subscribe to the idea that we can never learn or make logical
inferences about emotions, the same restriction applies to the emotions of human
beings as well as to inferences about an animal’s, or anyone’s, fear. Why should
we believe Marian Dawkins when she writes that Balcombe’s book about animal
pleasure left her with a “depressing feeling”? Why tell us about her feelings,
which can’t be proved?

In addition, there are studies being done in which the pleasure centers in
nonhuman animals’ brains are stimulated in such a way as to encourage or compel
the animal to seek to perpetuate the pleasurable feeling, as indicated by his or
her behavioral response to the stimulus. Do I err in my recollection that
science has identified areas of the brain in certain species of nonhuman animals
that are responsible for feelings of pleasure in those species?

Also, there is a standard of intellectual inquiry that calls for the
simplest, most reasonable explanation of a given phenomenon. If I see sad body
language such as drooping in one of our chickens, I conclude that the chicken is
not feeling well and that this feeling probably reflects an adverse condition
affecting the chicken. Conversely, if I see a chicken with her tail up, eating
with gusto (pleasure!), eyes bright and alert, I conclude that her condition is
good and that she feels happy. Why should I doubt these conclusions when the
preponderance of evidence supports them?

What I see in scientists like Marian Dawkins, who scold people for daring to
infer (or to argue) that recognizable expressions of happiness in an animal most
likely mean that the animal is feeling good, is stinginess, a niggardly attitude
and a crabbed spirit hiding behind a guise of so-called objectivity and
principled, never-ending doubt. Probably when a person views nonhuman animals
mainly or entirely, for years, in laboratory settings that elicit little more
than dullness and dread in the animals being manipulated for study, one loses
one’s sense of continuity with these “objects,” while extrapolating the
deadening anthropomorphic determinism of the laboratory environment to the
entire world, excepting one’s own professional culture.

It could be that, over time, these circumstances have the effect of eroding
the capacity for spontaneous happiness and pleasure in the behaviorist to such
an extent that the behaviorist’s own diminished emotional capacity becomes the
scientific standard by which she or he judges everything else. When this
happens, the so-called science is little more than self-massage, the scientist
little more than a self-medicator, a self-referential system incapable of making
a worthwhile contribution to life outside the institution.

____

Karen Davis is the president and founder of United Poultry Concerns, a
nonprofit organization that promotes the compassionate and respectful treatment
of domestic fowl. For more information, visit:
www.upc-online.org and
www.upc-online.org/karenbio.htm.

United Poultry Concerns is a nonprofit organization that promotes the
compassionate and respectful treatment of domestic fowl. http://www.upc-online.org

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